Connections: Lighting The Lamp

Since Teacher Magazine's first issue in September 1989, the
purpose of this column has been to look for connections among the main
features in each issue and the lessons they might offer. The story
topics aren't chosen based on any theme, and often we have no reason to
expect them to have anything in common. Fortunately, they almost always
do, even when we least expect it.

Take this issue, for example. David Ruenzel set out to write about
what has happened to the middle school reform movement, but he ended up
writing more about one particular school, Canton
Middle School, in an impoverished Baltimore neighborhood. David
Hill traveled to Norwich, Connecticut, to write about a controversial
charter school that the National Education
Association and its state affiliate endorsed and the local affiliate
opposed. Although it was this conflict that drew him to Norwich, most
of his story focuses on the difficulties of starting a nontraditional
public school. And finally, there is Greg Michie's media literacy story, which seems to bear no
relationship to the other two.

But as it turns out, these stories have much in common.

The first two are about schools trying to do something different. In
1991, Baltimore principal Craig Spilman and his faculty launched
wide-ranging reforms that transformed Canton from a dysfunctional
school into a successful one. In Norwich, meanwhile, Joan Heffernan and
a colleague created an alternative program nine years ago at Buckingham
Elementary called Integrated Day. When their request to expand into
three additional classrooms was turned down, they transformed
Integrated Day into one of Connecticut's first charter
schools—and ignited a community controversy in the process.

These two schools have other things in common, as well. They are
small and have multiage classes, characteristics that guarantee
teachers get to know their students well. (At Integrated Day, teachers
and students even eat together.) Canton and Integrated Day each give
teachers unusual autonomy and empower them to make important decisions
about their time, their students, and their classes. Both have high
expectations for what students should know and be able to do. Their
students take on long-term projects that require them to accept
responsibility for their own learning. The schools have abandoned bells
and rigid schedules, and their curricula are integrated and
interdisciplinary.

As research and experience both suggest, all this is the
prescription for a successful school. Canton, a school with 90 percent
of its students from poor families, scored higher last year than any
other Baltimore school on the state's basic-skills writing test. Before
it became a charter, Integrated Day was so popular that it was picked
up at another school. When the charter school opened this fall, it
already had a waiting list.

Teacher Greg Michie exemplifies at the classroom level many of the
fine qualities Canton and Integrated Day demonstrate at the school
level. He wanted to try something different—to help his mostly
minority students become critical viewers of the media. His principal
gave him free rein to design a media studies class for upper graders at
Seward Elementary, a K-9 school located in inner-city Chicago.

Michie gets to know his students well, and he holds them to high
standards, expecting them to do good work. And in his class, they
usually do. He challenges them, makes them think, and doesn't let them
slide by. Like the teachers at Canton and Integrated Day, Michie
worries that what his students study won't stick. So he strives to link
their classroom experiences to the world they live in.

Michie puts it this way: "I knew that I couldn't fight students'
disengagement by simply creating slogans that forbade it ('Stop being
bored!') and that I couldn't make students think simply by requiring
them to do it. I had to find ways to engage them. I had to find things
for them to do—things that were relevant, things that would
interest them, things that could not be accomplished without the one
element that sometimes seems most foreign to school classrooms: real,
live, unadulterated thinking."

That's an important first step toward lighting the lamp of
learning.

—Ronald A. Wolk

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